That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn't move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank.

On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend's ring and asked her if she was married. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage.

He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse.

According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.

The story of my life autobiography